Frankly, I don’t care what the Republicans say. It reminded me that our founders, when they wrote the Constitution, they suspected there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.

That was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responding to news that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had taunted her for saying she won’t send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until McConnell and his gang help draft rules for the trial that both political parties can agree on.

“She’s exactly right,” I said to Swamp Rabbit, who was huddled near a space heater he stole from Home Repo. “There’s nothing in the Constitution or The Federalist Papers that says our system of checks and balances might be upended by a carnivorous rogue turtle. If Hamilton and the others had imagined McConnell, they would have warned us.”

“No, no, no,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “It ain’t just Turtle Man went rogue, it’s the whole Republican Party. Every one of their Congress critters is pretending Trump’s impeachment ain’t real, that the law ain’t the law.”

I had to admit the rabbit had a point; that the party of Joe McCarthy, of Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew and Ronald Reagan, of law and order, of vigilance against anything Russian, is in effect saying Trump did no wrong when he implicitly threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine, our ally and an antagonist of Russia, unless Ukraine announced it would look for dirt on Trump rival Joe Biden. The Republicans are condoning Trump’s aborted attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into helping him get re-elected.

But it’s not too late, I told Swamp Rabbit. Pelosi and the Dems are still hoping for a better outcome. They want to be allowed to present pertinent documents and key witnesses at the trial.

The rabbit laughed. “Republicans ain’t gonna let that looney bird John Bolton testify under oath, or that dumb grifter Mick Mulvaney. They don’t want nobody to hear no more evidence. They just want to make sure Trump gets a quickie acquittal.”

Right. A quickie acquittal would cap Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, an outcome that suits Republican legislators, all of whom serve the “elites” and get rich in the process. They hated Trump at first but soon realized he was just what they needed — a dictator type who wows bigoted working-class white voters by appealing to their hatred of elites. (How’s that for irony?) They’re not going to let a little thing like impeachment mess up a good thing.

“They’re saying impeachment don’t mean nothing,” Swamp Rabbit said.

They’re saying worse than that, I told him. If inviting a foreign power to interfere with American elections isn’t an impeachable offense, then the entire Constitution “don’t mean nothing.”

Footnote: Did you check out the most recent Democratic debate? If history made sense, Democrats and the MAGA crowd would already be lining up to vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, two highly competent enemies of the elites. But history rarely makes sense except in retrospect, when the academic armchair quarterbacks pretend to know the cause and effect of all that happened.